A large part of successfully working across a production is about cause and effect and predicting the future. If you are just dealing with things on a day to day basis, you are going to miss what’s heading towards you. You must see what is coming. The difficulty is doing this while also dealing with what any particular day is throwing at you.

Here’s how this happens: you might have a delay in a particular area and now you’re behind in one process. You scramble and maybe you have to find someone else to get what you need that day or maybe that week. That’s your short term and it’s important and it can take a lot of your attention to get that sorted. But that attention is only on the now. Maybe even in the now, it doesn’t seem like all that big a deal – you can handle it. You have got it sorted.

But project to a month down the line. The person you got to fill in has taken a while to grasp the style, their output is just that little slower for the first few weeks and now things are just too tight. Someone else throws a spanner in the works, some other process gets delayed, and that’s all it takes to throw the production into full-on crisis.

That’s just one example – there are so many ways that a small challenge now or, more likely, a build up of small challenges now can lead to a major problem later in the production.

So what do you do? The first thing is to always look at what is coming – what you planned for and what has now changed. Where will the next potential jam occur? What happens when new plans meet old systems? What do you have to do now to minimise the problems that could be coming? Examine your schedule and processes for more information. The next thing is to protect every other part of the process. Because the big problems can come from a build up of little problems, once you have identified one problem, lock down everything else – the more you can avoid any other change in the processes, the better your production will be and the more you can focus on just fixing the issue at hand. It is so often when problems collide that they become a big deal. Do what you can to make sure everyone knows that the parameters in other areas must not change.

The important thing is to make sure things don’t build. Never assume things will sort themselves out. Never put off dealing with a challenge. Tackle it now, lock down and protect everything else and, if you can do that, you’ll never have to deal with an actual crisis.